Who We Are
Worker Power draws on the best traditions of movement organizing and non-violent direct action to execute electoral and policy campaigns that have a decisive and national impact on issues affecting our lives.
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Worker Power recruits and trains workers and young people as agents of political change in their communities. These leaders are building a movement that will elect and support public officials who fight for working people.
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Worker Power is a 501(c)(4) social welfare organization. We are a multi-racial, multi-generational organization dedicated to preserving democracy and improving the lives of working families across the United States through voter engagement and strategic policy interventions.
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Worker Power Institute is a (501c3) multi-racial, multigenerational organization dedicated to achieving economic, social, and racial justice in Arizona and nationwide through civic and policy engagement.
Since 2012, Worker Power has driven progressive electoral victories and policy changes nationwide. Through our leadership-building programs, we have trained thousands of organizers, many of whom now hold leadership and public office roles. We have engaged hundreds of thousands of voters to participate in decisions that shape their lives and won key policy battles. Through direct democracy programs, we have improved job quality and overturned hundreds of millions in corporate tax giveaways. Since 2020, Worker Power has knocked on over 4.5 million doors in three states, mobilizing thousands of organizers and shaping key elections.
2008
Worker Power Institute (formerly Central Arizonans for a Sustainable Economy, or CASE) was launched In Arizona in 2008 when several labor unions and community groups came together to form a new organization to advocate for economic, social, and racial justice for working families.
2012
Worker Power started in 2012 as CASE Action Fund and conducted our first partisan electoral campaign, “Adios Arpaio.” We mobilized more than 4,000 volunteers—most of them high-school students—who collected more than 35,000 voter registrations to unseat the anti-immigrant Sheriff Joe Arpaio. Arpaio barely survived that election, and Worker Power and our partner organizations defeated him in 2016.
2018
Worker Power led Arizona’s most extensive independent expenditure field campaign and helped elect pro-worker candidates to statewide office for the first time in a decade.
Since 2012, Worker Power Institute has enrolled over 100,000 voters into Arizona’s permanent vote-by-mail list, most of them BIPOC and youth voters. By doing so, we have increased voter participation among underrepresented communities in federal, state, and local elections.
2020
Worker Power knocked on 750,000 doors to help elect President Joe Biden and Senator Mark Kelly in Arizona. In Georgia, we knocked on an additional 550,000 doors to flip the U.S. Senate. When few others dared, our canvassers put on masks, hit the pavement, and turned out the vote.
Our organizers and canvassers registered more than 10,000 voters and knocked on more than 750,000 doors in Arizona and 300,000 in Georgia, primarily among voters in low-income, BIPOC-dense neighborhoods.
While the 2024 election outcomes brought challenges for working communities in Arizona and across the U.S., our unique power-building model–partnering with social-movement labor unions to conduct mutually reinforcing worker organizing, electoral, and policy campaigns—enabled us to generate unprecedented victories for working people in Arizona and elsewhere.
Our independent expenditure program mobilized over 600 canvassers to organize thousands of working people—especially young voters and members of communities of color—to fight for policies we urgently need: quality education and health care, affordable housing, environmental action, and reproductive freedom.
Worker Power’s canvassers knocked on 1.3 million doors in Arizona and 150,000 in California, contributing to key victories such as passing the Arizona Abortion Access Initiative and defeating a number of anti-democracy and anti-worker propositions placed on the ballot by the legislature. We had over 300,000 conversations with 250,000 voters, helping to elect Ruben Gallego to the U.S. Senate, collecting victories in Arizona’s contested Legislative Districts 2 and 17, and delivering the critical margin of victory in California’s Congressional District-45, CA-47 and in CA-13. Locally, we achieved historic progress by electing Lupe Conchas to the Glendale City Council (where he will serve as that City’s first LGBTQ City Council member), and strengthening Phoenix’s progressive leadership through the election of Anna Hernandez and the re-election of Betty Guardado to the City Council.
These electoral victories reflect nearly two decades of leadership development, fighting for worker’s rights, voter engagement, and deep coalition-building.
2022
2024
Coalition Building with Core Partners
Rebuilding Our Base
Expand the Electorate
Technical and Field Capacity-Building
Voter Mobilization
Nonviolent
Direct Action
Trainings
Community Resistance to Corporate Handouts
Town
Halls
Building on the lessons from the 2024 election and organizing power gained through the Tucson Summer Pilot, Worker Power will use the following tactics to preserve democracy and fight for working people:
Arizona has maintained a powerful electoral infrastructure for many years now, but the deep coordination of leaders and organizations to build power outside elections has been severely underdeveloped. Worker Power is addressing this gap by anchoring partnerships dedicated to mass mobilization against the current Presidential Administration’s political and economic agenda, while advancing hopeful alternatives rooted in the aspirations of our constituents in Arizona and nationwide.
On a national level, having already launched a successful coalition and base-building pilot this year, we are currently working with labor partners in Pennsylvania and Florida to help them launch similar programs. Additionally, we are helping our Pennsylvania partners expand their electoral strategic and technical expertise through the ground-breaking data visualization and analysis technology, the Vehicle, that will supercharge the ability of progressive organizations and unions to conduct innovative, targeted and successful organizing and electoral campaigns.
On a statewide level, Worker Power has formed an Alignment Group with several of the most advanced community organizations in Arizona–LUCHA, Our Voice Our Vote, and Chispa Arizona–to build a statewide network of organizers and activists who can lead a grassroots movement that influences elections and policy in Arizona. We are also leading the efforts of the Alignment Group to include in this movement the union workers from UNITE HERE Local 11, the Arizona AFL-CIO, the Arizona Education Association, and other significant local unions to our coordinated efforts. The general work of these aligned groups is likely to center on Maricopa County, where two thirds of Arizonans live.
In Southern Arizona’s Pima County, Worker Power is working to pull together more than a dozen issue-based, local grassroots leaders and activist groups into a coherent region-wide force. Those groups include Veterans for Peace, Reproductive Freedom for All, No Desert Data Centers, Tucson Education Association, the Working Families Party, teachers and researchers at the University of Arizona, and many others.
In Pinal County, Worker Power is developing local relationships while partnering with the United Auto Workers and Rural Arizona Action to mount a defense and provide an alternative to the massive expansion of industrial enterprises and data centers that is currently occurring in the region with no regard to job quality, community development, or environmental protection.
Our grassroots organizing strategies are rooted in improving the lives of working people and identifying the points of the issues around which we can achieve their mass mobilization and participation in decisions that shape their lives.
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Between January and October of 2026, Worker Power will field a canvass that will collect partisan voter registration applications, including AEVL (Active Early Voter List) among young people and communities of color.
Recognizing that data-driven decision-making is crucial to any strategic effort, especially during the tight electoral and policy races in the U.S., Worker Power partnered with John Underkoffler, the award-winning MIT scientist and founder of Oblong Industries, to create the Vehicle – a next-level analysis and visualization software and display room designed to enhance our ability to strategize campaigns and comprehensively communicate those strategies. In 2026, our team will focus on expanding the Vehicle to include the campaign finance information and legislation sponsored by elected officials. Additionally, we are working with several labor partners on transforming the Vehicle into a full-scale organizing and voter engagement platform that can serve as a movement-owned alternative to NGP VAN. With NGP VAN and its products now in the hands of private-equity raiders, this project is more timely and important than we could have imagined when we started out—allowing unions and grassroots organizations to collectively build, control, and protect the data infrastructure our democracy depends on.
In 2026, Worker Power will continue to build on our electoral work in Municipal, Statewide, Legislative, and Federal races to ensure victories by progressive candidates.
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